Facebook Hacking Lands Juvenile in Jail

A California court ruled last week that intentionally hacking into someone’s Facebook account, even if you did nothing illegal to get their password, is felony identity theft.

Today, I’m going to step outside of my legal marketing box and simply share some interesting, and a bit shocking, news from the world of social media. In this case, a juvenile was accidentally sent the password to a stranger’s Facebook page. He then took that password and signed into her page, and “adjusted” her profile with a vulgar description and also posted some similarly offensive items on a few of her friends’ pages using her identity.When he was caught, he confessed.

While stupid, a fairly harmless prank, right? Not according to the California courts. A juvenile court found him guilty of a felony, and he was sentenced to 90 days to a year in a juvenile offenders program.

The California statue says it’s illegal when anyone “willfully obtains personal identifying information (of the victim and) uses that information for any unlawful purpose, including to obtain, or attempt to obtain, credit, goods, services, real property, or medication information.” The court further said, “(he) used that info for an unlawful purpose when he defamed the girl.”

My gut tells me that this sort of thing happens every day, and I imagine the California court was looking to set a precedent to stem the tide of illegal social media account hacking. But it does bring to mind that while many of us are on social media pages every day, it pays to remember that security is important, not just for those of us using social media for business purposes, but for our kids and others as well.

So with that in mind, here’s a partial list of things you can do to help ensure the security of your social media pages:

• Never share your password with anyone. In a business environment, this might be a bit harder, so at a minimum, make sure there are a limited number of people with access to your firm pages. Or even better, have one person “in charge” of all posts, even if they are written by a number of people at your firm.
• Connect only to legitimate people and businesses. If someone you connected to starts posting things that make you uncomfortable or are just plain offensive, disconnect from them and report them to the social media site as well. Just because someone connects to you doesn’t mean you have to follow them back, and it’s your social media “playground,” so you are in control of who plays in it.
• Don’t display too much personal information that will make it easy for people to hack into your account or guess at passwords. And on that note, make sure your password is truly unique. Your pet’s name or street address are not unique enough. Think of something that no one else will know.
• And I doubt this is an issue with legal marketers very often, but if you even sign into your account on a public computer, make sure you sign out when done, never click “remember this password” and clear the cache if you can. I’m amazed at how many stories I read about people who access their Facebook accounts at the library, forget to log off, and are then hacked.

Like everything else in life, it pays to play by the rules and safeguard your information. So, on that note, what do you think of the juvenile’s court ruling? Did they overreact to a prank? Was it a good move to help prevent future hacking? Or was it truly identity theft and an appropriate punishment for the crime? With all my legal marketing readers out there, I imagine there are quite a few opinions on this one.